Blog

The history of the national conviction that dietary fat is deadly, and its evolution from hypothesis to dogma, is one in which politicians, bureaucrats, the media, and the public have played as large a role as the scientists and the science.

~ Gary Taubes

Finally someone from the conventional world of nutrition has stepped forward to state the obvious: Swedish expert committee: A low-carb diet is most effective for weight loss. Mainstream guidelines can no longer ignore what the alternative media has been saying for years: animal fats are good for our health. Every single person in the world should take this opportunity to redeem our ancestral diet which saw us thrive as intelligent human beings. It is about time to hold accountable the aberration of a diet that has taken hold of our world today, with processed and high-carbohydrate foods that perpetuate the worst state of health human history has ever seen.

Big Agra, Big Pharma and the Food Industry reign over a population crippled with dementia, diabetes, obesity, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, allergies, respiratory problems, digestive problems, and mood disorders which no mainstream guideline can heal or cure satisfactorily. If something is achieved, it is a very bad quality of life at best, requiring something between 4 and 12 pills per day to sustain, and which slowly poisons even the most resilient.

Nurses around the world train diabetic people on dietary guidelines which only perpetuate and worsens their disease. You might be familiar with the following argument: “When calculating your insulin requirements, ignore fats as they don’t raise insulin.” Right there you have a big clue to the cure! Yet the brainwashing and lack of critical thinking is such that health care providers can’t recognize the solution right in front of them even if they spell it out themselves. Then a nonsensical protocol is advised where people have to eat up to 5 times a day, including a carbohydrate meal every single time, just so that prescribed insulin doesn’t bring blood sugar levels to dangerously low levels. Most brochures and guidelines given to diabetic patients are written and published by pharmaceutical companies that are then selling the very same prescribed insulin. Imagine if people knew that they only need to drop the carbs in order to decrease their insulin needs. God forbid they should ever cure their diabetes with a low carb diet!

Our brain’s dry weight is 60% fat. Cholesterol plays such a vital role in our mental processes that 25% of our body’s free cholesterol is found in the nervous system. Contrary to popular and dogmatic belief, without fat we are toast, both figuratively and literally speaking. In fact, more trouble comes from having lower rather than higher levels of cholesterol. A whole host of health problems as well as the familiar ‘aging’ problems are consequences of not getting enough of the good fats from our diets. Long gone are the days when the elderly died peacefully in their beds after a long-lived life full of experiences and with full cognitive abilities. Now senile dementia is considered the normal way to end your cognitive life.

Today, an American develops Alzheimer’s disease every 68 seconds. In 2050, an American will develop the disease every 33 seconds. An estimated 5.2 million Americans of all ages have Alzheimer’s disease in 2013. The number of people living with dementia worldwide is currently estimated at 35.6 million. This number will double by 2030 and more than triple by 2050. Not to mention depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric problems. Depression affects 121 million people worldwide and these are mainstream stats for 2011. For most, things have gotten worse since then.

The number of studies published throughout the years that remove blame placed on animal fats and put it where it belongs – sugar – is overwhelming. We have reached a point of no-return. It is time to hold accountable the mainstream policies which perpetuate food guidelines that have proven to be unhealthy since day one.

Dracula in charge of the blood bank

It is hard to imagine how things were before the agricultural revolution, but without even going back that far consider that we have huge divergence from how we used to eat just a couple of hundred years ago. According to neurobiologist Stephan Guyenet, U.S sugar consumption has increased steadily in the U.S. to the point that in 1822, Americans ate the amount of added sugar in one 12-ounce can of soda every five days; while in 2005 Americans were eating that much sugar every seven hours. The worst part is that his numbers don’t even factor in the amount of sugar in fruit and ‘safe’ starches, which is basically what our governments recommend: rice, pasta, bread, cereals, potatoes, etc. By Guyenet’s numbers, the increase is so steady that if current trends continue, by 2606 the US diet will be 100% sugar and we truly will be living Idiocracy!

Our physiologies have basically no defense against this sort of onslaught. The sugar load in our diet has grown unnaturally, exponentially, and grotesquely from what our paleolithic ancestors once knew. For a food that we have no need whatsoever to consume, the amount of sugar consumption in the U.S alone is completely unacceptable and outrageous, courtesy of the industrialization and commercialization of the American food system. Forget Big Business, it’s Giant Business, and it’s at the expense of your health.

As Professor Simon Capewell from the University of Liverpool puts it, putting the food industry at the policy table is like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. The conflict of interest is massively outrageous. Instead of admitting that the Food Industry is part of the problem, it is asked to provide a solution! Not even remotely interested in health, but very much interested in short-term profit, the Food Industry is capitalizing on the obesity epidemic and your suffering by manufacturing processed foods which are dubiously marketed as ‘healthier’.

There is a huge financial and personal interest in the guilt-tripping “It’s Your Fault” propaganda pushed by the drug companies, weight loss centers, academics, government and food industry. They use and abuse research and real science for public relations and covering up blatant conflicts of interest. They depend on you being worried about the risks of being obese and on you worrying that it is your fault. It is always the same with the standard dietary guidelines: participants lose some weight, and then most gain it back, and then some more.

Point of no return

Evolution is the best guide to what should be our optimal diet. Our paleolithic hunter-gatherer diet whose type and quantity of consumed fat changed with seasons, latitudes, and the coming and going of ice ages – defines human history. It takes time for any given population to adapt to new factors in its environment. The longer we’ve been eating a particular food as a species, and the closer that food is to its natural state, the less harm it is likely to do. We’ve been eating as cavemen for the entire course of our human history. It has made us who we are. As reported by Gary Taubes in Good Calories, Bad Calories:

It’s what the British epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose meant when he wrote his seminal 1985 essay, Sick Individuals and Sick Populations, and described the acceptable measures of prevention that could be recommended to the public as those that remove “unnatural factors” and restore “biological normality” – that is… the conditions to which presumably we are genetically adapted. “Such normalizing measures,” Rose said, “may be presumed to be safe, and therefore we should be prepared to advocate them on the basis of a reasonable presumption of benefit.”

The sicker and fatter we are, the greater the needs to eat a physiological diet according to our bodies’ make-up, that is, a low-carb diet. Why would excluding or restricting animal fats be expected to return us to “biological normality”? It is precisely this that brought us to the current mess and health catastrophe. Why would ‘safe’ starches – vegetables, fruits, tubers, legumes and grains – restore us to health when carbs are precisely the one food group that is not needed to run the human machine?

Health gurus recommend a minimum of 120 to 130 grams of carbs daily in order to give our brains sugar. But the brain doesn’t need this when there are no carbs in the diet and enough fat is consumed. Our brains heal and run the best on fat fuel – ketones. It seems that the whole scientific body has turned against us. The psychopaths have taken over the asylum, while humanity suffers as it has not suffered before. As Gary Taubes explains,

“A simple answer, after all, implies that it should have been known all along; it implies that somewhere along the way our public health authorities had led us astray. A complex answer allows considerable leeway in the assignment of responsibility; it also allows for an indefinite postponement of any action or acknowledgement of error.”

It is not only our health; it is practically our entire civilization as we now know it. We haven’t known any other way of living for the longest time and look what it has brought to us: deteriorated health, wars, famine, slavery, and never-ending suffering. According to Greg Wadley and Angus Martin from the University of Melbourne:

Within a few thousand years of the adoption of cereal agriculture, the old hunter-gatherer style of social organisation began to decline. Large, hierarchically organised societies appeared, centred around villages and then cities. With the rise of civilisation and the state came socioeconomic classes, job specialisation, governments and armies.

The size of populations living as coordinated units rose dramatically above pre-agricultural norms. While hunter-gatherers lived in egalitarian, autonomous bands of about 20 closely related persons, with at most a tribal level of organisation above that, early agricultural villages had 50 to 200 inhabitants, and early cities 10,000 or more. People ‘had to learn to curb deep-rooted forces which worked for increasing conflict and violence in large groups’ (Pfeiffer 1977:438).

Agriculture and civilisation meant the end of foraging – a subsistence method with short term goals and rewards – and the beginning (for most) of regular arduous work, oriented to future payoffs and the demands of superiors.

‘With the coming of large communities, families no longer cultivated the land for themselves and their immediate needs alone, but for strangers and for the future. They worked all day instead of a few hours a day, as hunter-gatherers had done. There were schedules, quotas, overseers, and punishments for slacking off’ (Pfeiffer 1977:21).

For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors practiced hunting and herding, eating a low-carb diet. The fact is, our bodies are designed, and have evolved, to live and thrive without consuming any carbohydrates whatsoever, so long as there is plenty of nutritious protein and fat available, and water to drink. Animal fat was our primal energy, as it was – and still is – the most efficient, dense and long-burning fuel. We became smart – Homo sapiens sapiens – because we ate animal fat and meat.

It is up to us to take the matter of our health into our own hands. Spread the word and make authorities accountable and aware about the Swedish Expert Committee report. Its officially time to drop hazardous low-fat guidelines.

I’m a former heart surgeon who after learning all about the heart and repairs of same from a strictly mechanical point of view, had decided to embark on a healing journey. I was born into a mixed Eastern-Western family and I’ve had the amazing opportunity to live in several countries. I currently work as a countryside family doctor and I spend my time researching all things related to health and wellness and the true nature of our world.

Comments

Imagine walking into a medical doctor’s office and seeing this simple statement up for all to see.

Empowerment is a personal responsibility and yet schools, the medical system, governments, broadcasting media services, I doubt any organisation that serves the pubic has an affirmation like this as parts of its mission statement.

I would make the statement more universal:
“It is up to each of us to take the matter of our lives into our own hands.”

The other day a medical doctor, a spokesman for the provincial medical system, was on a local station of our national radio, CBC, discussing flue vaccinations for children. He was asked why many parents were not getting their children vaccinated and his response was that people were spending too much time on the internet and getting the wrong information from so called health sites. I remember the time before the internet and getting wrong information from libraries and home encyclopaedia was the culprit.

I believe it is true to say that when scare tactics, shame and blame are the message, then the message is false. Truth comes from reason, not artful persuasion by guilt.

His is Orwellian speak, the information this medical doctor from the highest level of a provincial government was feeding us, and the interviewer did not doubt or challenge his words.

Dr Segura, people such as you bring moments of joy and hope to those stumbling but trying to live outside convention. If I may speak from my heart, please, next time you look in the mirror, give your reflection a broad smile. Truly, your voice makes all the difference.

(this is the second time a post has not taken so I am submitting it a second time.)

Thanks for your kind words. Nothing is going to change if people don’t wake up to the fact that they have to be their own main healers. Docs, nurses, therapists, etc… are companions. Unfortunately, with the corruption of science that has taken over the medical science, one has to be very well read and informed and trade carefully in the health care system, specially when it comes to diet and prevention of disease, weight loss and dealing with chronic conditions. But in the end, it is much more rewarding.

Yeah, mainstream medicine is barbaric and completely backwards. Hopefully folks will catch up. The ketogenic diet is really miraculous, from cancer to epilepsy to schizophrenia. I wrote a summary here:

I’ve been doing intermittent fasting for about 3 years (16 to 18 hours a day fasting with the rest eating ad-lib). I’ve tried a ketogenic diet as well, which I was fine on, except I really disliked the smell of my sweat (as did my wife – which matters! :) ). I now eat enough carb to avoid the smell, but try to get a high percent of my caloric intake from butter and fat!

Recently I’ve moved to doing 24 hour fasts as well. About once a week, 2 hours before I end the 24 hour fast , I do some high intensity anaerobic exercise. I’m 40, exercised most of my life and I’ve _never_ felt better (or looked better!).

I try to tell others about this lifestyle and they think I’m nuts :)

I hope in not to many years the mainstream medical people will pick up on all this.

Well, enough carbs plus fat might not be a great idea. It also depends on the source of your carbs. Gluten is definitely not worth it. It is extremely inflammatory. The problem with the sweat does get better. See KetoAdapted by Maria Emmerich, it is really a great source.

Keep up the good work and the good health. All the best!

MariaJuly 30, 2017

I think this caveman hype is a sort of confirmation bias. Why is our ancestor always a caveman? What about Jungleman? Or a Coastman? Desertman? Not all the people were hunting huge animals in never ending winter in pre-historical times.

My Australian husband has aboriginal heritage. One of the corner stones of their diet has been wild honey – for tens of thousands of years.

What about my best friend, half African, from rainforests, where the main components of traditional diet is fruit (and some roots, rich in startch)?

I think this caveman hype is an over-simpilfication.

I have nothing against low carb diet. Our modern diet is horrible, of course, and we absolutely should not eat as much sugar as we do now. But maybe we could have a more realistic approach to pre-history when discussing eating habits.